Rutgers football is bigger than Rutgers

State Senate President Richard Codey was asked the other day whether Richard McCormick could survive as president of Rutgers University.

Codey, a master at sending signals even when he says nothing, shook his head, shrugged his shoulders and said: "Who knows?"

It almost makes you feel sorry for the Rutgers president. Since McCormick fired Bob Mulcahy, the university's director of athletics, top legislative leaders -- Codey, Assembly Speaker Joseph Roberts and Stephen Sweeney, the Senate majority leader and head of the appropriations committee -- all have been critical of McCormick. Piling on.

Noah Addis/The Star-LedgerRichard McCormick, president of Rutgers University, in his office at Rutgers University in New Brunswick in a 2007 file photo.

The problem is not some philosophical struggle over whether Rutgers should have big football. It has it and it is enormously popular, not just with the people of the state (and surrounding states) but also with powerful pols like Codey, Roberts and Sweeney.

The real problem is that, while New Jersey has big-time state university football, what it doesn't have is a traditional big-time state university -- not like other major state universities that support huge, and hugely expensive and popular, football programs.

That's no knock on Rutgers. Just history. New Jersey and Rutgers did not grow up together, one dependent on the other, each loyal to the other, creating the sort of bond seen in the Midwest and other states. A bond personified in, symbolized by, football.

There is no University of New Jersey. Never was, never will be.

The relationship between New Jersey and Rutgers, a private school until 1956, pales in contrast to the links between big state universities and the states that depended on them for more than a century to help with agriculture, mining, forestry, water resources, surveying, transportation, conservation, infrastructure and other public endeavors.

Rutgers was a Colonial college. It existed before there was a nation, and before the modern state of New Jersey. It was a religious school with ties to the Dutch Reformed Church, which still has a seminary on the campus.

Nothing wrong with that, of course. Most colleges in the Northeast were religious schools, based on European models like Oxford, Cambridge and Paris. They didn't train people in muscular practical skills, but in liberal arts. More than 100 years ago, one state university president said he believed Europeans would probably think of big, secular, nationalistic, practical and democratic state universities as "barbaric."

Rutgers got federal money from the sale of public lands to use in its highly successful agricultural station, eventually Cook College. That gave Rutgers a public function, but hardly a place in the public's mind or heart -- or in the halls of the state Legislature. It wasn't good old State U and never would be.

Need proof? The state stripped Rutgers of its medical school. Allowed the Newark College of Engineering to become the state's dominant engineering school. We don't have one State U -- but at least three. And that's not counting the over-reaching state colleges that now call themselves state universities.

Former Gov. James McGreevey, in a plan inexplicably endorsed by McCormick, even tried to break Rutgers up into three minor universities.

New Jersey loves RU football, but it doesn't love RU. Every president since it turned public has tried to figure out how it could persuade us that Rutgers was our university and earned our love -- and more public money.

Mason Gross wanted medical schools and hospitals and a dozen new undergraduate colleges. The state rebuffed him.

Then his successor, Edward Bloustein, came up with an idea as old as Caesar. Circuses. The idea of big-time sports: football. To make us think of Rutgers as our school -- because it had our team. If we loved Rutgers because we loved its football, then that would be reflected in the Legislature and in legislative support for the school.

Bloustein was partially right. Football was a hit. State residents who didn't attend Rutgers still went to see Rutgers football games -- or saw them on television -- and bought the paraphernalia and loved Greg Schiano. RU-rah, rah!

But it didn't translate into anything. Rutgers still suffers from underfunding. Its officials never have been, and are not now, viewed as valued partners in the historic development of the state. Not the way, say, Michigan or Nebraska university leaders historically aided their states.

There is no University of New Jersey.

But there is a Rutgers football team, Jersey's team, and fans and politicians who love it reacted angrily when McCormick fired Mulcahy, the man who, more than anyone else, fostered that love. McCormick is seen as just some meddling bureaucrat running a university that doesn't even have New Jersey in its name.

Bloustein never lived to learn -- and McCormick will undoubtedly soon learn to his regret -- that Rutgers football did indeed become big in New Jersey.